minutes of ESC call ...

[Christian Lohmaier]

Hi *,

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 7:12 PM, probono <probono at puredarwin.org> wrote:
>
>> no real need for Linux portable edition
>> tar-ball can be unzipped
>
> So can the AppImage:
> ./some.AppImage --appimage-extract

The point was that the linux builds don't have any external
dependencies that are not trivial/already fulfilled by virtually any
linux distribution.

The idea of having "one" package only (and not having people install
additional stuff just to run the package they were originally trying
to install) is solved already for LO.

> An AppImage has the added benefit that it does not have to be
> unpacked, because it mounts itself, which is a very fast operation and
> is space-efficient.

might be space-efficient but of course can also have performance
impact. And not space efficient on the side of those distributing it
without throwing away the modularity re languages.

> The discussion so far is missing AppImageUpdate zsync-based binary
> delta updates, which means that you can do from daily build to daily
> build by just downloading the few MB that actually have changed.

For this kind of usecase, we have bibisect repositories...

https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/admin/projects/?filter=bibisect

So bottom line: I'm not being sold.  I don't see a real benefit compared to a

for i in *rpm; do rpm2cpio $i | cpio -idmv ; done

or the tarball/instdir-only distribution like it is done for the debug build.

For other software packages it might have some benefits, but as it was
mentioned that appimage doesn't seem to take care of
dependencies/baseline stuff, the benefit of appimage as a whole is
unclear to me.

chmod +x and run vs unpack and run isn't a real difference, and
definitely no selling point, esp. with the removed flexibility
regarding the l10n/help packages.

ciao
Christian